Was just talking with a friend who is a shrewd political analyst and who is always worth listening to. He thinks Romney’s loss is basically irrecoverable after spending so much and getting beaten by an under-funded candidate who was an unknown not too long ago by nine points. In the end, the devastating Huckabee line was the one about voting for the candidate who seems like someone you work with rather than someone who laid you off. Both he and Obama rejected their party’s establishments and old-style politics. Obama rejected Clintonian triangulation and Edwards-style netroots rage. Huckabee rejected (at least notionally) Rovian zero-sum politics and the Washington GOP establishment. My friend thinks Huckabee has staying power and is going to be strong in South Carolina and Florida. Evangelicals are now fully vested in him, so he has a strong base going forward. Thompson stays in, but is going to have trouble ever eclipsing Huckabee. Rudy is going to have real trouble making the case he can unite the party in general as a pro-choicer after the rise of Huckabee. The advantage McCain has is that he is naturally suited to tap into the Huckabee change message–the call for cross-partisan cooperation and the distaste for the Washington establishment. This is a case where something old can perhaps become new again. But McCain has to make himself acceptable to conservatives and attack Romney from the right. If he makes the kind of mistakes he did in 2000, he creates the possibility of Huckabee winning the nomination. Another problem for Giuliani is that through his ferocious attacks on Hillary, which seemed so shrewd all year long, he has made himself a partisan figure in a way that Huckabee and McCain aren’t and roughly identified himself with the Bush-Clinton politics of the past. Just one take…